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Crockpot Double Lentil, Sausage, Brown Rice, and Spinach Soup

You can make this Double Lentil, Sausage, Brown Rice, and Spinach Soup in the Slow Cooker or on the stove!

A few weeks ago I made this Crockpot Double Lentil, Sausage, Brown Rice, and Spinach Soup on a day when my brother Rand happened to be in Utah visiting for my dad's 85th birthday party. Rand always likes to try out my leftover cooking experiments when he's visiting, and he loved this soup so much that when he went back home he asked if he could have the recipe *before* it was posted on the blog. I'm always in debt to Rand for the beautiful graphics he creates for the blog, so of course I was only too happy to send off the recipe by e-mail. Rand made the soup for friends in L.A. who also want the recipe now, so I decided I better hurry and get it posted!

If you're a fan of making soup in the crockpot, this is a great recipe to cook on the weekend when you're busy doing other things. But if you don't have a crockpot, check the end of the recipe for instructions of how to make this on the stove.

Saute the diced onion, carrot, and celery in a little olive oil, then saute the veggies with the dried spices and garlic before you add it to the crockpot. I think this extra step adds a lot of flavor to crockpot soups.

Cut up 3 pre-cooked sausages into bite sized pieces and add to crockpot.

Stove-Top Recipe Instructions:
Use at least 1 cup more stock or chicken broth for stove-top cooking.

Heat oil in a heavy soup pot, then saute vegetables, garlic, and seasonings as above. Add diced chicken sausage, canned tomatoes, chicken stock, brown lentils, red lentils, and salt and pepper and simmer over low heat for about 45 minutes, or until lentils are soft.

Add brown rice and chopped spinach and simmer about 30 minutes more, or until rice is soft. (Check to see if you need to add a little more liquid when you add the rice and spinach.) Stir in balsamic vinegar and simmer about 5 minutes more. Serve hot, with Parmesan cheese if desired.

Using low-fat chicken or turkey sausage and low-glycemic ingredients like lentils and brown rice makes this soup a great choice for phase 2 or 3 of the South Beach Diet. (I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing you could make a pretty tasty phase one soup with this recipe by using only lentils, adding more sausage, and leaving out the carrots and brown rice.)

Nutritional Information?
I chose the South Beach Diet to manage my weight partly so I wouldn't have to count calories, carbs, points, or fat grams, but if you want nutritional information for a recipe, I recommend entering the recipe into Calorie Count, which will calculate it for you.

More Tasty Soups with Lentils:
(Recipes from other blogs may not always be South Beach Diet friendly; check ingredients.)

(Want even more recipes? I find these recipes from other blogs using Food Blog Search.)

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This looks really good! I am on SBD, but hubby isn't (though he should be), and it's hard to find diet dieshes he likes; he's a real meat-and-potatoes man. I may have to leave out the spinach and just add it to my bowl.

However, he LOVED your double berry jello salad, enough so that he didn't eat any more of his canned jellied cranberry sauce after eating mine!

I also made your pumpkin cheesecake pie for me, as hubby wanted a pecan pie, and I used the crushed pecans crust as suggested in the comments. Scrumptious! I had enough filling for two pies, and I've brought one to work to LEAVE, as I ate the entire other pie by myself. I can't DO that anymore, but it was wonderful while it lasted.

Thanks so much for these recipes--it's making my life a little easier.

this soup looks wonderful. We don't eat processed meat so I might just use chicken or turkey here. Also, I've never used thyme in my cooking before but I see it now on all the cooking blogs I read - it must be "herb of the season" so I might just give it a try and see if I like it.

Hi Kayln - Faced with a large amount of stock and leftover turkey after the big day, I decided to make this soup with leftover turkey. It turned out great! I made it on the stovetop, and added the turkey about 10 min or so before the balsalmic vinegar. If I were doing it in the crockpot, would probably add it 30 min - ? Anyway, I'll probably try it with the sausage another time.

Delicious! My whole family (kids ages 3, 6, and 8) gobbled this up for dinner. I only had brown lentils, and used frozen chopped spinach, but otherwise followed as written. It was perfect for a chilly winter evening.

Delicious! We made this recently but had to make one change (can't find Spike, made up my own combo) and chose to use 1/2lb fresh chorizo and 1/2lb fresh chicken sausage instead of the packaged. Since I couldn't find Spike, I made up a combo of salt, fresh ground pepper, cumin, paprika, chili powder, and a little curry powder. I can't wait to make it again! Thank you.

We've made this three or four times already. Needless to say, we love it. I add some cumin and chipotle chili powder in with the spices. Try Harmon's own garlic chicken sausage. It's mild but adds great flavor. I also tried this soup with kale, and I prefer it. One of the best soups on the blog. Thanks, Kalyn!

really, really good! I wouldn't have made it if I didn't think that I would like it, but it still turned out to be a surprising amount of flavor for just a little bit of effort. I used no salt tomatoes and didn't add any salt for seasoning, and it was perfect!

if substituting kale for spinach would it be s straight out swap, time and quantity-wise? I've made this recipe with spinach many times. Some of us are vegetarians and so I use the Morningstar sausage crumbles (9oz) instead of sausage occassionally and we enjoy it equally as well.

This is just the sort of "leftover soup" recipe I needed -- I came across it on Yummly. Trying with leftover corned beef hash, chard from the CSA box, and leftover cooked white rice (so cutting down on the liquid a bit). Thank you for the inspiration and guidance on cooking times.

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